Can you still make money from SEO today?

There can be many reason for Moz to re-brand, think of:

- company want to go more broad
- SEO has gotten a bad name due to scams
- people are scared of SEO due to Google updates
- there's more then just SEO, think of SEM, SMM, PPC

SEO can be a stable source of traffic but you have to take stable with a grain of salt, I recovered my site multiple times. If I receive 6000 visitors a month over a course of 10 months a year and 2 months a year I spend on re-structuring/re-designing my sites due to some new Panda filter that I wasn't prepared for then that's still 6000 visits * 10 months = 60k visits / 12 months = 5000 visitors/month. Not too bad and those numbers are realistic, not made up or something.

Especially if you look at the alternative like PPC, which would have cost me say: 60.000 clicks * $0,20 = $12000,-, while SEO'ing the site and building links from my private network would have cost a customer around $1000,- while the cost price for me is somewhere around $500,-

Other example, I had a site that costed me all together $200,-, it made $3000,- while it ranked well, then it tanked at some point, though tanked it still brought in $50/month from longtail traffic and it has been like that for 2 years already. That's 24 months * $50 = $1200,- from a site that most consider lost. I would call that one heck of a ROI, and I don't see that income disappearing any time soon.

So stable source of traffic or not, yes it can be stable measured over the long term, but it's not 100% passive, Google's algorithm does change and you need to take the time and sometimes a little bit of money for new content to adjust to that.

I just recovered a batch of 10 sites affected by Panda 4.0 in only 1 week time and it now ranks better then ever so how unstable is that traffic really when you know what you're doing and know its recoverable with some tweaks. I never believed in passive income btw, as something like that simply doesn't exist so if that's what people were thinking and hoping for then sad enough they were wrong right from the start, every way of income takes time, however my life is filled with holidays so it's definitely passive enough, despite me sometimes working months in a row at 16 hours a day to maintain my easy life.

That's why I get pissed off sometimes, people are freaking lazy and refuse to do their research and keep up with changes, instead they claim a method to be dead, unstable or near dieing and cause they have some type of guru status caused by their bank cheque which is a result of their only decent skill, scaling big time, people start to believe them and also start yelling on forums that SEO is not worth it.

To all those people, show me one method/concept that gives a better ROI then SEO.

It simply doesn't exist.

Anyway, I can point you at tons of SERP's where people are completely killing it with grey hat and black hat, and that's definitely not restricted to 1-3 week lasting churn & burn in Payday Loan or Viagra niches. Is there a secret to it? Not at all, just private blog networks and decent structured sites, but not setup in the way like most advertise or preach it on IM forums. Instead setup in a solid way, on real hostings, with domains with real strength instead of faked / artificially created PR and that kind of cheap tricks.

Has SEO become expensive? Yes definitely a lot more expensive then before when people could launch a 5 page site and spam it with some softwares, but the ROI justifies it, Google could make it even 5 times more hard and it would still give the best ROI of all methods.